Hello, secondary trauma in Ma-jick Mo-ments (November 2019)

I used to laugh about this shit. I mean, it was kind of funny. Who gets triggered by someone else’s experience?

Me. That’s who.

This forensic mitigation case has begun to give me nightmares, guilt, crying spells, and an overwhelming sense of failure. There is no end to the horror that he experienced. It’s even worse for his mother. In order to understand her, one of the professors suggested I watch documentaries on state school (read: developmentally delayed storage warehouses) scandals. There is no joy in this. Willowbrook and Geraldo? Not even Geraldo’s seventies swinger ‘stache was funny. That’s some fucked up shit, when you can’t laugh at a pornstache.

I had to hold a kid to watch that shit. THEY TOOK SHIFTS. All three of mine climbed into the other half of my chair and let me rub and rub and rub their backs. When they got sore, they tapped out and another one would climb on. I love my kids. I do NOT love the fact that forty, fifty damn years ago, they would likely have been inmates of schools like Willowbrook.

No. No way. No fucking institutions. Maybe for the ones who literally cannot be left alone for a moment for fear they’ll hurt themselves (or someone else) but not for children like mine. NOT as an only option. NOT without me being able to see them when I want. When they want. Whenever.

No.

I think if I had known this case for this class dipped so far into the developmental delay bucket, I might have had a chance to drop it. Now I’m stuck. We’re about to present.

And I can’t stop crying every time I think of this poor woman, trapped between life imprisonment in a state school and life imprisonment in a marriage where a man endlessly pumped kids out of her. She had six live for him, one from a previous marriage, and numerous miscarriages and stillbirths. She was hospitalized. Burned. Possibly beaten. She couldn’t cook (or she really didn’t understand nutrition.) She couldn’t wash her own hair (or she didn’t.) Well, she didn’t even have running water in that shack, in the late 60s…No laundry. No baths. No cleaning. (That bit’s all over the welfare department reports.)

And I just keep thinking, “what if that’s the future for my daughter?”

So I gotta keep going, I know, but my head’s so bad right now.